The New York Times, as expected, seems to have settled on a date for the paywall to go live: January, 2011.

There’s no point in hashing out, again, whether or not this is a good idea for the New York Times and the many other major metro papers considering such a move. The one good thing about paywalls going live is that the theoretical questions will finally be answered in the real world.

No, what’s interesting is whether this is a good idea for other sites serving those same markets. If, for instance, The Chicago Tribune eventually opts for a paywall of any kind, do the people in the newsroom of WLS and other local media bliss out over the potential for reaching more news consumers? What about the rapidly growing ecosystem of micro-local news and information sites serving communities and towns? If your local newspaper walls up, will you pay, or find other sources?

By stepping back from a 100% free model — no matter how carefully (and slowly – we’ve been talking about this for years) — the large news sites can’t help but create some amount of vacuum into which the smaller sites — and audience — will flow.

But that’s where this all gets very interesting. Because if we’ve learned nothing else in the past decade, it’s that gathering a large audience — “eyeballs,” as the ad guys used to say — is no longer enough. Large publishers and tiny publishers need to cover their costs and make a little profit in the bargain if they’re going to continue publishing. So flowing into the vacuum isn’t enough for the upstarts — they need real business plans.

Recently in the NY Times Magazine, there was a long look at the business models of the non-traditional publishers that have emerged in recent years. It strikes more of an elegiac tone than I think is entirely appropriate, implying that the task is Sisyphean, but it’s essential reading for anyone trying to understand the struggles the journalism business model is facing and will continue to face.

The overriding theme: The future is much, much leaner for journalism, and that business models will need to change, radically, to accommodate that fact:

…the new world could end up looking a lot like the old one, albeit with smaller newsrooms and new players. Politico replaces the Washington correspondent, TMZ is the gossip page and you can get coverage of your baseball team directly from MLB.com, which employs professional sportswriters. In cities like San Diego, New York and Washington, online start-ups are taking on metro news coverage, hoping to tap local ad markets. All of these publications have been hiring real, full-time employees — as have nontraditional providers like Yahoo, which is constructing a new political news site.

If you’re a journalist or a publisher, whether you read that passage and weep or rub your hands with anticipation and hope is a good indicator of what the next few years hold in store for you.

Photo: Creative Commons license, flickr user Shawn Econo.

As she often does, Amy Gahran got me thinking today, this time about the average-at-best job local news organizations do covering consumer news. She asks whether news orgs could focus on shopping year-round, and not just on Black Friday, to do a better job of offering utility to readers.

The short answer: yes. The long answer, though, needs to also address the nagging question of why newspapers aren’t doing this already.

Ultimately, I think the problem is how we define what journalism is. And under currently-accepted definitions, helping shoppers find deals isn’t up there with Comforting the Afflicted and Afflicting the Comfortable. The irony is – especially in our current economy – data-driven consumer reporting could be of incredible value to local communities.

To figure why this is – why What’s On Sale is relegated to the commercial side of the house – let’s step back for a second and look at what newspaper do cover.

Is this journalism?

I think we’d all agree that covering the intricacies of local government counts as journalism. Certainly tallying the numbers and types of crimes – whether through narrative journalism or in a database – is journalism as well. Grading a movie? Tracking baseball stats? Charting the financial performance of local companies? All journalism.

But what about sales and deals? What if news organizations reported on that? Where are the best shoe sales? Which grocery chain has the cheapest milk? Which stores have the worst parking lots or the shortest check-out times? Is this journalism?

And what about auto mechanics? Who can you trust? Who specializes in Mini Cooper repair? What’s the going rate for an oil change? Is this journalism?

These examples may not read like dream assignments, even for someone fresh out of J-school. But they could very well be exactly the information that people in our market are looking for, but can’t find. Anywhere.

So, if it is journalism, why not do it?

So the question is simple, but provocative: if it’s just as difficult to report on the machinations of a complex government bureaucracy as it is to scope out the best deals this week at Big Box Mall (both can’t be effectively automated and both require reporting) why do news organizations choose to do one and not the other? And are we sure that readers would agree with that choice?

I’d argue that if newspapers want to grow readership and revenue, they to do both. They need to think even more broadly about what they mean when they talk about “reporting.” And they need to think of new and more useful ways to deliver that information that gets to the user when she wants it and needs it. This flips the existing reporting hierarchy upside-down:

Imagine a team of reporters whose job it is to cover consumer spending – arguably one of the most important drivers of our local economies and something all of our readers spend many hours doing – from the point-of-view of the consumer. And not in the traditional way, through columns and slice-of-life narratives, but with real-world data that will make it easier for people in our markets to live their lives. How surprising and welcome would that be?

And imagine a structure that would allow for data to come from multiple sources – reporting shoe-leather, data-feeds from participating retailers, reports submitted by readers – and distributed at the moment of greatest need: when a reader is at the mall, in the supermarket or in the car.

For a significant portion of the local audience, this is exactly the kind of high-utility, relevant information they need and that a large, organized newsroom is uniquely qualified to provide.

If only we’d agree that it’s journalism.

Who’s doing this well? Any examples of any US newspapers marshalling significant forces against retail data reporting?

I think he needs to take a deep breath and consider what’s really bugging him. Is it that people don’t care about news? Or is it that they don’t care about what he thinks is the right news?

For 12 years I studied the logs of what people were reading locally (at baltimoresun.com), and for the most part, the results are heartening.

People want exactly what local news organizations are set up to best provide for them: local news and sports. There will be the occasional outlier about Britney or Clay or some heinous and gruesome murder in another state, but most of what rises to the top of daily, monthly and yearly readership patterns is the bread-and-butter journalism that most newspeople say they care most about.

So why’s William upset

The top-viewed stories don’t reflect the work of 600-plus journalists busting their asses around the world.

He’s right. A dispatch from South Africa or Tibet in the local paper’s web site isn’t exactly going to drive big numbers. But report on a local crime spree or a controversial piece of local legislation and you can almost hear the page-view counters clicking loudly.

This is a good thing. Local readers want local news primarily. They certainly expect their local news web site to have all the national and world news, in case they need it, but that’s not why readers go to latimes.com or baltimoresun.com. They’re there for the news that matters most to them locally. CNN.com and wsj.com are just a click away and do it better anyway. But the one thing they can’t do well – the one thing local newspapers still have, for now – is local news.

It’s not that the readers don’t appreciate the efforts of the newsroom. It’s just that they appreciate the efforts a whole lot more when what makes it into print is locally relevant, unique and useful.